Senate Judiciary Committee hearings began yesterday to consider the possible confirmation of anti-gun activist David Chipman, Joe Biden’s nominee for director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).
Biden’s nomination of an enemy of gun rights is just another step in the direction of dismantling the Second Amendment.
In a February speech commemorating the third anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings in Parkland, FL, Biden used the tragedy to renew his call for “Congress to enact commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets.”
Prior to this speech, Biden’s head of the Domestic Policy Council, Susan Rice — who last year called for creating a national gun registry, gun buybacks, and gun bans in an interview with Moms Demand Action and Everytown For Gun Safety — and Biden senior advisor Cedric Richmond held a virtual meeting with representatives from Brady Campaign, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety, and Moms Demand Action.
Rice and Richmond indicated to those in attendance that Biden was ready and willing to use multiple avenues to try to curb gun violence, including executive action, a promise that excited Adzi Vokhiwa, the director of federal affairs at Giffords. “I think everything is on the table. I think the White House is certainly supportive of Congress doing their part. I think there are things we’d like to see happen through legislation. … But certainly there is a role for executive action,” said Vokhiwa.
Following the mass shooting in Boulder, CO in late March by a man who was a follower of radical Islam and an ISIS sympathizer — the far-left blamed that one on white supremacy and a lack of gun control — Biden followed through on his executive action threat by issuing a boatload of anti-gun executive orders, just as Obama and Trump had done before him.
At the same time that Biden issued his executive orders, he nominated anti-gun activist David Chipman to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), a man who once worked as a senior policy adviser at Giffords, the gun-control law center mentioned above that met with Rice and Richmond.
We’ve teamed up with @Everytown, @BradyBuzz, and @CJActionFund on a video and six-figure ad buy urging senators to confirm @POTUS’s eminently qualified nominee for ATF Director, David Chipman. Experts agree that the Senate should #ConfirmChipman.https://t.co/Kn4cc4BTiN
— GIFFORDS (@GIFFORDS_org) May 25, 2021
Here’s a snapshot of the anti-gun background of David Chipman (via Gun Owners of America):
David Chipman began his career regulating gun rights with the ATF. He left ATF to lobby for Everytown for Gun Safety and later the Giffords Law Center. United States Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) Reports indicate that David Chipman made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from 2017 to 2020 lobbying against the constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms. He also made over a million dollars lobbying for gun control in just six months between 2012 and 2013. (emphasis mine)
David Chipman has supported many of the Far-Left’s anti-gun bills. Here are just a few provided by GOA:
- Ghost Guns Are Guns Act
- Assault Weapons Ban
- Bipartisan Background Checks Act
- Gun Manufacturers Accountability Act
- Gun Violence Prevention Research Act
- Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act
- Handgun Licensing and Registration Act
- Raise the Age Act
- Gun Show Loophole Closing Act
- Firearm Risk Protection Act
- Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act
- SECURE Firearm Storage Act
- Armor-Piercing Bullets Act
- Background Check Expansion Act
- Extreme Risk Protection Order Act
- Closing the Loophole on Interstate Firearm Sales Act
- Disarm Hate Act
- Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order Act
- 3D Printed Gun Safety Act
- Resolution for Keeping Guns Out of Classrooms
- High Speed Gunfire Prevention Act
- Bumpstocks and Acceleration Devices Act
In addition to his anti-gun activism in these areas, Chipman is also an advocate of the “pre-crime” approach being promoted in legislation like the 2019 bill co-sponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Krysten Sinema (D-AZ), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) called the Threat Assessment, Prevention, and Safety Act (TAPS Act). This bill is they claim will “stop dangerous individuals before they can commit an act of violence.”
In David Chipman’s approach to pre-crime, he wants to arrest prospective gun purchasers in gun stores following a failed background check in order to stop a crime before it happens.
“While at ATF, I conducted studies involving people who failed background checks to determine how many later committed crimes with a gun — many did. This is a perfect opportunity to arrest people before committing crimes rather than responding after the fact.” (emphasis mine)
Gun Owners of America also points out that as Senior Policy Advisor for the anti-constitutional rights activist group Giffords Law Center, Chipman wrote an article entitled Legal and Lethal: 9 Products That Could Be the Next Bump Stock. The document purports to show how the ATF could arbitrarily ban certain shotguns, pistols, ammunition, and even magazines by regulating them under the National Firearms Act without an act of Congress.
It’s tempting to erroneously dismiss Joe Biden and his gun control agenda as just another example of Far-Left extremism under the mistaken belief that Republicans will oppose it — even though history tells us they will support it. Instead, we need to let it remind us of how dangerously close we are to the loss of liberty and the destruction of our once-great Republic.
It should also motivate us to prepare to do what we must to defend our God-given rights against the tyrants out to destroy them.
One of the things we can and should do is let our representatives know that we vehemently oppose David Chipman as the next ATF director. A quick and easy way to do that is to use the pre-formatted form provided by Gun Owners of America to send an email to your senators in Washington. It only takes about a minute.
You can notify your senator by clicking this link.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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